from Hacker News

How Google missed the boat

by queensnake on 2/22/14, 5:13 AM with 107 comments

  • by troymc on 2/22/14, 7:19 AM

    Blogger isn't the winner of the blog engine wars anyway. That would be WordPress, which is open source and now runs about one in five websites.

    http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all

    It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?

  • by ralphm on 2/22/14, 7:04 AM

    “The technology of the last 10 years should have all been open to experimentation by developers without locking users in. There are a lot of developers who believe in this. It's central to the mission of WhatsApp, btw, so if you doubted that it could be lucrative, you should think again.”

    WhatsApp has changed and extended their XMPP basis such that it is not even remotely interoperable. They are actively battling third-party implementations. Their server is not federated. How exactly are "open", "experimentation" and "without locking users in" central to WhatsApp's mission?

  • by kriro on 2/22/14, 10:07 AM

    I think they could have done Google+ and the whole social aspect better but they are still driving a couple of important buses. I think they should work on an open source WhatsApp clone with strong crypto.

    - The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser

    - Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS

    - Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service

    - They provide "cloud office"

    - Search is still search

    And they have a bazillion other good projects.

    If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.

  • by dsl on 2/22/14, 6:24 AM

    Google missed the boat because they only hired academics, not hackers.

    They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.

  • by drakaal on 2/22/14, 5:57 AM

    The premise that they missed the boat is wrong. They built a leaky boat because their core competence is in a different field. Google didn't "Miss the boat" they just never studied Nautical Science.

    Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric.

    Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money)

    Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social.

    The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.

  • by soup10 on 2/22/14, 9:49 AM

    So google failed to catch the social bus, who gives a fuck. Google is an engineering company at it's core, and as long as they continue to do ridiculously cool and useful R&D with their search advertising revenues in the hopes of developing new killer products. They are a far more impressive and valuable company than their derpy cousins at facebook who mostly just capitalize on people's vanity and boredom.

  • by mirsadm on 2/22/14, 7:33 AM

    I'm glad we have this guy to tell Google how to run their completely unsuccessful business that missed the boat.

  • by rsync on 2/22/14, 6:54 AM

    Wrong wrong wrong. OP, comments, parent, children, all wrong.

    Tim Wu, Master Switch, monopoly over distribution channels - that is the answer. Either google ceases to exist or it becomes Ma Bell.

    There's no third way, and all of the things that google does that seem confusing make perfect sense if you view them through the prism of trying to become The Phone Company.

  • by meowface on 2/22/14, 5:51 AM

    Interesting how a lot of the advice in here parallels Steve Yegge's infamous rant.

    The link, for anyone who hasn't read it: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

  • by varelse on 2/22/14, 5:08 PM

    Vic Gundotra ruined Google+, which could have and should have relegated Facebook to 2nd place, but then Real Names happened and the rest is history.

    Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them.

    Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases.

    That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.

  • by pointillistic on 2/22/14, 12:00 PM

    What is unbelievable about this conversation is that the question about how content creators will get paid for the content is never raised. In fact this is biggest mistake. There are questions about how app developers get their exits but not how people who create content get paid. This is the heart of the problem with the internet today, not how someone can build the next bottleneck aggregator that rides on the wave of users creativity but pays them nothing in return. Social or not.

  • by yuhong on 2/22/14, 6:11 AM

    Another HN comment on this issue (I wonder why HN don't allow its own comments as submissions):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754053

    Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced that Facebook was a threat.

  • by Mikeb85 on 2/22/14, 7:19 AM

    What boat did Google miss? Seems to me they're achieving their goals. They own search, they own video (YouTube), they have a very successful mobile OS, they have a successful desktop platform (Chrome OS and the Chrome browser), and they're innovating faster than anyone.

  • by NicoJuicy on 2/22/14, 11:48 AM

    Anyone who thinks Google+ has missed the boat doesn't understand Google+.

    Google+ brings together: - SMS - Chat - Likes (+1), on apps, youtube, websites - Videochat / screen-sharing / helping out - The easiest OAuth implementation (Facebook needs an App-ID), google needs nothing - Your location information (Android) - GMail - Contacts (backup of your cellphone) - SEO (their platform is OPEN for the web, while Twitter and Facebook wants to hide their information) - Information for businesses (Google Places) - and probably a lot more that i didn't thought about right now. - Pictures (backup of your android phone, default tag= personal) - Documents (Google Drive)

    Now, to create a social network, what do you need and what does Google + doesn't have? Google+ is probably one of the most used communication social network... But a lot of it is going on in the backend and you don't see it on the web.. Because people don't really use it right now (they don't use it by going to Google+ and enter their message there).

  • by toyg on 2/22/14, 6:37 AM

    Dave Whiner lamenting the demise of RSS and OPML, you don't say!

  • by B-Con on 2/22/14, 7:54 AM

    > Their search engine was and still is the glue that holds the web together. So, why didn't they build around that?

    Yeah, if only every product they offered either:

    a) had comprehensive search capabilities (YouTube, GMail, map, etc)

    b) was at least decent integrated with their flagship search (News, YouTube, images, Blogger, heck, Android, etc)

    c) was a variant of their flagship search (images, news, sound, etc)

    I think it's fair to say that Drive/Docs/Keep and Calendar are fairly independent of Search. Tsk, tsk, for shame.

  • by sidcool on 2/22/14, 6:31 AM

    It interests me how people expects Google to do all the things they want. Let's be sure that Google is a business, not a missionary organization. They will guard their business interests first.

  • by mcv on 2/22/14, 11:50 AM

    They did try to provide an open platform with Wave, which was amazing, powerful, innovative, open source and decentralized. And it failed. I wish it hadn't; I liked it a lot.

  • by WWKong on 2/22/14, 7:37 AM

    I strongly believe that was the right way to go. I never understood why Google didn't make a big push for standard structured information. They could have published standards for different industries similar to RSS. Everyone would have gotten on board similar to how every blog was pushing a RSS feed. Once the web moved towards structured data it would have been the first big step towards Semantic web.

    Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".

  • by whitef0x on 2/22/14, 7:07 AM

    First of all twitter's growth is slowing, so its not very apt to compare them to google. And the same thing may start happening to Facebook in a few years (as people are notoriously fickle with social media sites - which depend on mass adoption - not innovation). I think google is doing the right thing - they are sticking to what they know instead of trying to 'build around the web' and become another Microsoft (who tries to make 'their own version of everything' example - Silverlight).

  • by api on 2/22/14, 6:31 AM

    IMHO Google was somewhat psyched out by Facebook and made the classic mistake of copying their rival. Google+ is almost an exact copy of Facebook.

  • by voyou on 2/22/14, 11:02 AM

    Odd that Winer doesn't mention Google's actual attempt to do what he suggests here, which was called OpenSocial (and had buy-in from MySpace, back in 2007 when that might have mattered): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial

    I'm not sure why Google gave up on this approach, but it's not the case that no-one at Google was thinking along these lines.

  • by auctiontheory on 2/22/14, 6:53 AM

    When you're just so damn rich, and the money keeps pouring in, it's very hard to stay focused, to relentlessly innovate, to admit (if only to yourself) that you're just as imperfect as everyone else, and make just as many mistakes.

    It was true for Microsoft, it's true for Google, and it's true for everyone else. (Well, those of us who are rich enough not to have to give a sh*t. Not me personally.)

  • by perfunctory on 2/22/14, 1:14 PM

    Google is a public company whose goal is to make money for their shareholders. How projects described in this post help them achieve that?

  • by robg on 2/22/14, 5:25 PM

    All good points on openness, but I don't want services built off of my searches or history. That's their core product but it's one based on the assumption of privacy, not sharing.

  • by izietto on 2/22/14, 11:52 AM

    In Italy we say "missed the train" :-)

  • by BorisMelnik on 2/22/14, 5:54 AM

    Ohhh love the site framework and use of snap.svg. Interesting how he didn't mention Google+ not once.